Recent Posts

Warriors of Qiugang, the excellent short documentary on China’s environment that I blogged about earlier this month, has been nominated for an Oscar. As I mentioned in my previous post, this film is required viewing if you want to understand...continued→

A great deal has been written about the struggles to resolve China’s overwhelming environmental problems, but I have seen no better or more visceral portrayal of these issues than The Warriors of Qiugang, a short documentary film by Academy Award-winners...continued→

Environmental transparency in China showed both progress and retreat over the past year, and many implementation challenges still remain. This was one of the overall findings of the second annual Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), which the Institute of Public...continued→

This blog is co-authored with Barbara Finamore. This past week Liang Congjie, one of the founders of Friends of Nature (FON) and the godfather of China’s environmental movement, passed away. The establishment in 1994 of FON, China’s first legally registered...continued→

Adam Moser at Vermont Law School’s China Environmental Governance blog drew a contrast between a blog post of mine discussing China’s efforts to meet its energy targets, and a post by Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations positing...continued→

It is remarkable that the U.S. Clean Air Act is under attack these days. Have we come to take the blue skies in the U.S. so for granted that magazines are running columns with titles like “Clean Air Act: Defend...continued→

We are pleased to release the English version of our 2008-09 Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), a collaboration between the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). As you may recall, PITI is...continued→

I am in Tianjin this week for the climate talks, and the mood, compared to Copenhagen, has been subdued. In contrast, all around China government officials and factory owners are working themselves into a frenzy to meet their share of...continued→

NRDC would like to congratulate our partner Huo Daishan for being named as one of the recipients of the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, known to many as Asia’s Nobel Prize. Mr. Huo has been a passionate advocate for the Huai River,...continued→

It has been a horrible month for China’s environment. Last week while workers in northeast China pulled more than 3,000 barrels - each containing 170 kilograms (374 lbs.) of flammable chemicals - out of the Songhua River, a plastics factory...continued→

I was in Weihai (en), a 2.5 million person city in eastern Shandong Province, last month to talk about environmental transparency with more than 50 government officials and scholars from around China. As far as I am aware, this is...continued→

As I’ve blogged about before, one of the keys to fighting China’s pollution problem is strengthening China’s environmental governance system. This is a view not just held by environmentalists, but one that is also held by a growing number of...continued→

This blog was co-authored with Barbara Finamore and Alvin Lin. The thrust and parry of the post-Copenhagen blame game reached a fever pitch just before the holidays with a number of media articles suggesting that China was responsible for an...continued→

[Update (3:25pm local time): Wen and Obama both spoke this morning and we are clearly not yet at an agreement. Wen's talk contained important language about transparency, international dialogue and cooperative exchange. Obama emphasized that "We are ready to get this...continued→

One week down, an agreement to go. The first week at Copenhagen was intense in and out of the Bella Center. Inside, thousands of government bureaucrats and staffers mixed with thousands of environmental advocates, researchers, students, journalists, bloggers and a...continued→

About

Switchboard is the staff blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the nation’s most effective environmental group. For more about our work, including in-depth policy documents, action alerts and ways you can contribute, visit NRDC.org.